and future Prospects. 5487 



and modern zoologists have boldly added, that no species closes its 

 career naturally, meaning thereby, that all meet with a violent death :* 

 they would fain go further than this, and hint at their extermination 

 by man, — a dangerous and most improbable doctrine, — a hypothesis 

 unsupported by any proof, even in the case of the dronte, which, we 

 are told, was exterminated by Portuguese sailors.f Species, we are 

 told, have disappeared as a consequence of external violence, other- 

 wise they would have been perpetual, fixed, eternal ! Assumption 

 again ! for it is not species alone which have perished, but genera and 

 forms of life wholly distinct from the existing order of things. Why 

 perished the ancient vegetation, so unlike the present, and whence 

 came the present, but from the past ? That species have remained 

 fixed since the time of Aristotle, and long before, is a fact which must 

 be taken in conjunction with this other, which we owe to Cuvier: 

 "There was a time when the present organic world did not exist, 

 but another, or rather other forms of life wholly distinct." If 

 species, then, are fixed, historically or in man's recollections, they 

 are not eternal as regards the past, nor the future if it is to re- 

 semble the past : nor can we altogether depend on what we see : it is 

 but the other day when the taenia and the taenioid forms of animals 

 were declared to be specific forms ; now we know that they are not 

 so, — they are generic, if we may so say ; they can even for a period 

 retain this generic form, maintain an independent position and propa- 

 gate their young, as if they were individualized, specialized adult 

 forms. These discoveries, the result of direct experiment, are but of 

 yesterday, but their importance in discussing the theory of life is vast, 

 and can scarcely be overrated. The reply of Cuvier to Geoffroy and 

 the German school, who maintained the direct descent of the existing 

 species from the past by a modification or degenereration of the fossil 

 species, — namely, that were it so the modifications ought to have been 

 gradual (graduees) ; " there ought," said he, "to be a series of shades 

 between the fossil and the actually existing, and traces of such modi- 

 fications ought to be found in the interior of the earth, yet we find 

 them not:" this objection, which seemed so probable at the time, is 

 being met, and may shortly be fully answered. These sliades are 

 being daily found, and this has been distinctly proved by De Blain- 

 ville ; 2nd, if we adopt the theory that all generation is generic \% 

 that specializations of every kind depend on the nature of the existing 

 order of things ; that if certain of the modified forms filling up the 

 great scale of beings be not yet found, it may arise from this, that 

 these forms have not yet been called into being, and cannot therefore 

 be found; then the objections of Cuvier, at the best somewhat trivial, 

 as referring solely to historic periods, fall to the ground. The living 

 species, then, are not absolutely new creations ; but, in whatever light 

 this may be viewed, one thing seems certain, — the utter falsity of the 

 doctrine of Aristotle, who fancied that Africa's ever-varied and glorious 

 Fauna arose out of the scarcity of water, which, bringing to her 



* Fleurens. f Id - + Knox. 



